"How about a turtle? I love those leathery little snappy faces." - Buster, Arrested Development

 

The amazing leaf-backed turtle, Wilderosi Magnifici. Actually, I spent an hour attempting to find out what kind of turtle this was on teh Intarwebs, but the closest I came up with was the Fidelcastros Eensies, a Cuban turtle that produces no cigars. Not many people know this, but the turtle is nature's suction cup.


I’m often reminded of Diane Fossey’s work with chimpanzees sororities Jon Bon Jovi gorillas when I deal with The Boy and Pugsley. Here are these perfectly cute little mammals, and, yet, they couldn’t fix a copier if you gave them a sledgehammer and a bottle of SuperGlue®. In fact, if I came back after leaving them with those simple implements for an hour, I would find both of them and the hammer stuck to the drywall of my ceiling above the shower with a matching set of perplexed looks on their faces. Plus, the shower door would be broken, and both of them would deny doing it.

Makes me want to give them a bottle of SuperGlue™.

Anyhow, we had our own Diane Fossey moment the other day. We have a cement pond pool at our house (no, not rich, just try to find a house in Houston without one). The Mrs. takes responsibility for cleaning it, The Mrs. finds a sort of Simon and Simon sort of Zen® (maybe even a Magnum P.I.® sort of Zen©) when she cleans it. Occasionally The Mrs. comes across some amphibian as dead as Fran Drescher’s career, and then uses some combination of tools from my shop (last time it was the table saw) to remove it from the pool area.

But what happens when it’s alive?

Umm, that means it’s a turtle. We had one living in our pool for about three days last week. When The Mrs. went outside it would dive like Rosie O’Donnell for the last Danish on the dessert tray for the deep end of the pool. The Mrs. didn’t want to deal with it.

Me? I’m contractually bound by provision C.2.8.j.f of our marriage contract to ”deal with all things smelly, icky, and amphibian that may heretofore or at any future point whatsoever come into contact with anything. Forever.”

So, in addition to cleaning penicillin from the fridge, I guess that includes turtles in the pool.

I got home and The Mrs. pointed out the four-legged-shelled interloper. I sighed. The Mrs. quoted C.2.8.j.f. chapter and verse. I got out the net, and snagged our little turtle friend.

Turtles go “thunk” when you bounce them on concrete? Did you know that?

Me, I have as much experience with turtles as dolphins have with hang gliding. Where I grew up there was some sort of desert horned-toad (that I’m sure is now on an endangered species list – if an 8 year old can catch one, they shouldbe extinct) that we used to regularly capture and put in boxes and feed insects until they died.

Turtles? Some of them are snapping turtles. They can chomp off parts of me I love. Some of them can turn into fire breathing dragons like Gamera. Some are just robots in disguise waiting to eat cars, like Deceptiturtle.

In short, I know a much about turtles as Kyrgyzstan knows about vowels. I put on steel-toed boots, grabbed a net, and scooped the turtle up from the bottom of the pool in a single smooth motion. Success. As I looked it at, heck, it looked like a big green discus, with all legs and head tucked into the shell. It reminded me of a paperweight.

We threw it as far as we could onto the neighbor’s lawn in the direction of the local bayou.

No longer our problem.

Diane Fossey had gorillas in the mist. We had turtles in the pool.

I just want Bill Paxson to play me in the movie version.